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This paper makes links between the original writers and the idea of meta-representation after Zenon Pylyshyn's 1978 definition of the term, as a means of being aware of all forms of meta-cognition. Specifically, the ability to be aware and to discuss types of mental process and relationships to mental objects is meta-representation.
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On existential psychotherapy: A hermeneutic and meta-representational perspective
Ian R Owen
Given that Heidegger criticised Sartre, and anyone who would begin philosophy with consciousness
rather than thinking being, and that he disliked existentialism for its humanism, it could be possible
to mis-understand the role of hermeneutics and intersubjectivity in the approaches to psychotherapy
that are existential. This paper answers these topics via the question ‘what is existential
psychotherapy?’ Some of the many possible answers are considered en route to the favoured answer
concerning hermeneutics, intentionality and intersubjectivity. Psychotherapy cannot remove the
past nor can it sometimes alter the current problem. What is offered minimally, is an opportunity to
change perspective and that invokes hermeneutics. With reference to other theoretical stances, these
are also understood as hermeneutic and justificatory. One aim of the paper is to move towards
practice and prepare for an appraisal and development of existential therapy. But before any
retrieve, there is a need to come to terms with the history of the variegated set of positions called
existential therapy. It is not possible to make an exhaustive analysis of all the writers who have
been named ‘existential’ nor discuss practice in detail. This paper appraises Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty who are nominated as the most central proponents of existentialism because they base their
stances on the original work of Husserl and Heidegger (amongst others). Reasons are provided to
justify this selection. Another aim is contextualising the broad church of contemporary existential
therapy. What follows is not an in-depth appraisal but a sketch of some of the most salient points.
The term “meta-representation” is introduced as a version of the concept of intentionality and links
are made to developmental psychology. Below, a number of questions are posed and not all of them
are fully answered. The paper argues for a rejection of non-self-reflexive, non-hermeneutic and
non-intentional stances. Not only are human beings and relationships intentional and intersubjective
but meaning requires a specific stance in order to judge the accuracy of alternative theoretical
accounts.
This paper argues that in order to refine practice and theory, what is required is a clearer
understanding of the hermeneutic position of oneself with respect to the manifold of hermeneutic
positions that exist in everyday life, as well as the tangle of 400 theories and practices (Karasu,
1986) that comprise the ensemble known as counselling, psychology and the psychotherapies. In
order for each practitioner to know how to proceed with a client, it is argued that one should be able
to account for how one interprets the psychological situations of clients and ourselves, in relation to
1
specific and general situations. To get straight to the point: it is argued that a minimally adequate
account of the therapy situation is one that accounts for the different perspectives of client, therapist
and other parties: this involves psychological meaningfulness. What stance or stances can be
occupied to provide a proper perspective on the human condition, which can account for these
different perspectives? Or better, what conditions are thinkable that organise or structure
psychological meaningfulness, in that what is experientiable and understandable, is capable of
being adequately understood from valid perspectives? The point is that not only is it necessary to
understand how everyday psychological life makes sense through the conditions of its possibility
but to understand how any therapy of the everyday life can be judged: It is necessary to judge
between different hermeneutic perspectives, hypotheses of cause and effect and ultimate
justifications and preferences.
Existential therapy comprises a number of philosophical reflections on lived experience.
The question ‘what is existential therapy’ can become ‘whose work is included in existential
analysis or psychotherapy?’ Is it just Heidegger’s critique of Freud? Or is existential therapy a
talking therapy that excludes the possibility of using specific interventions? The first answer offered
to the question of the scope of existential therapy is that there are many writers within the area who
do not define their practice with respect to Heidegger and Freud. It is true that Heidegger’s critique
of Freud has been very influential. But psychoanalysis is not the only form of therapy. And there is
a great disparity between Heidegger and Freud on intentionality and consciousness. It could be
argued that Heidegger’s claim to have improved on Husserl (a preference for the being of Da-sein
and the relation to being or other Da-sein) is not a help to the work of therapists who are caught up
in the mass of questions concerning the presence of the past and becoming more comfortable with
themselves and the nature of human existence. Nor does Heidegger’s critique of Freud reflect the
whole breadth of the field of existential therapy, which is also sceptical, and a critical space (eg
Szasz, Laing). Nor does the Heidegger-Freud nexus say enough about the important role of
hermeneutics.
A second look at the question ‘what is existential psychotherapy?’ could be to scrutinise its
parts by asking ‘what is existential phenomenological philosophy?’ Or, even more generally by
asking about its closest relative ‘what is Kantian philosophy and what does that do?’ Answers to
these questions then run into considerations of the extent of the research required to create a
sufficient answer. ‘What is existential therapy’ can become ‘which writers need to be understood in
order to define the whole of existential phenomenology?’ Or ‘which writers can be genuinely
classed as existential even if they are not existential phenomenological?’ As regards philosophy
generally, the point of the application of philosophy to therapy means valuing philosophical stances
pertinent to it as better than non-philosophical approaches. To refine the question further would
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mean offering an answer to the question ‘who needs to be considered?’ Indeed, would the work be
done when the whole of scope of what therapy does could be sketched? So let us consider the
relationship between Heidegger and Sartre as a way of understanding a central facet of what it
means to be existential.
The difference between Heidegger and existentialism
Heidegger criticised Sartre for his humanism and never classed himself as an existentialist. In 1945
Sartre gave a lecture that was published three years later in English as Existentialism and
Humanism. In it Sartre made his crossover stance on Husserl and Heidegger clear and claimed that
his work was in accord with Being and Time. “Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and
myself … have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence -
or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective”, (1948, p 26). Heidegger’s reply is the
Letter on Humanism where he wanted to take Being and Time back from the French reading of it.
“Sartre’s key proposition about the priority of existentia over essentia does, however, justify using
the name “existentialism” as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort. But the basic tenet of
“existentialism” has nothing at all in common with the statement from Being and Time - apart from
the fact that in Being and Time no statement about the relation of essentia and existentia can yet be
expressed, since there it is still a question of preparing something precursory”, (Heidegger, 1993, p
232). Caputo explains this difference as being due to Heidegger’s development in thinking since
1927 (Caputo, 1999, pp 229-231). The other phrases used to make this difference clear are that an
ontic psychological, or anthropological, reading has been made of philosophy. For essentia to come
before existentia means that possibility comes before actuality. What Heidegger concluded in 1947
was that thinking Being is “neither theoretical nor practical” nor a “conjunction” of them (1993, p
263) and that thinking is a return to a source, no longer in the style of previous philosophy, but
more original than that (Ibid, p 265). It is clear that Being and Time is not a book on psychology
and should not be read as such.
The difference between Heidegger and French existentialism seems to be as follows.
Heidegger was strongly against the intuitus, which he thought was superficial. “The idea of the
intuitus has guided all interpretation of knowledge ever since the beginnings of Greek ontology up
to today, whether that intuition is actually attainable or not”, (1996, p 328). “Phenomenology of Da-
sein is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates the work of
interpretation … hermeneutics…receives a specific third and, philosophically understood, primary
meaning of an analysis of the existentiality of existence” of Da-sein as the conditions for the
possibility of a phenomenological ontology and historical comparisons of the understanding of
3
Being (Ibid, p 33). But the penultimate footnote to the text of Being and Time reads: “Thus not
existential philosophy” with respect to his evaluation of his approach as a “hermeneutic of Da-sein”
or “analytic of existence”, (Ibid, p 397). So there is a good deal of difference between Heidegger
and French existentialism (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel and others).
Heidegger in History of the Concept of Time (original lectures given in 1924) argued that
Husserl’s treatment of consciousness and intentionality was insufficient and that considering being-
in-the-world was the answer1. But there is a counter-argument because Heidegger never got to grips
with a host of topics to his own satisfaction and rejected formal and logical methods of answering
the question of Being, as section 83 of Being and Time shows. The closing pages of Being and Time
show its author pouring doubt on the worth of his approach. But in what way did Heidegger make
intentionality more understandable by considering Being? Contrary to Heidegger, it can be argued
that he did not further the understanding of intentionality by the five reductions2 in Being and Time.
Did the promise of History of the Concept of Time, repeated in Being and Time, ever come to
fruition? Perhaps, the attempt to better understand intentionality did not occur. Furthermore, there is
a question as to the usefulness of a discourse about Being and the placing of intentionality and
contextuality in Da-sein’s Being, because a discourse concerning mental processes is part of
everyday understanding and speech and can be easily understood by clients.
In answer to these points, a first part-answer is supplied concerning what French
existentialism believed: The work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre are selected as
the two key writers who are definitive of the position of existential phenomenology: This is because
they focus on the work of Husserl and Heidegger in the main, and provide a reaction to the natural
attitude specifically, in the assertion that human being is intentional being. Ricoeur also commented
on existential phenomenology and his definition stipulated three core topics of the body
(1957/1967, p 208-9), freedom (p 210-211) and the other (p 211), with the latter two themes
broadly in agreement with Sartre.
Being and Nothingness is explicitly a crossover between Husserl and Heidegger (amongst
others). Section two of the introduction states “Husserl has shown that an eidetic reduction is
always possible… For Heidegger … it can always pass beyond the phenomenon toward its being”,
(1958, p xxiv). Sartre is in agreement with Heidegger when he asks for “the exact relation which
unites the phenomenon of being to the being of the phenomenon” to be understood (Ibid, p xxv).
Some of the other relevant themes are as follows. Some passages in Being and Nothingness mirror
Freud’s attention to the latent meanings of symptoms and dreams in his attempt to find explanatory
wishes. Sartre made a parallel between Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious amongst the
conscious, and urged an existential psychoanalysis of the symbolic relation between the individual
style of a conscious life and the fundamental total structure that it indicates - a developmental
4
inquiry (Ibid, p 569). Existential psychoanalysis focuses on the interpretative ability to understand
the human condition that is prior to all understanding - and is tied to intersubjectivity. Sartre
defined existential psychoanalysis as rediscovering, in each instance, the totality of each person.
New positions on one’s own past can be attained through the analysis of on-going choices that are
both free and determining of consciousness (Ibid, p 573). Sartre also wrote of psychoanalysis that
“its method is better than its principles”, (Op cit). But whereas psychoanalytic interpretation should
help clients understand themselves; existential analysis leaves that possibility to clients (Ibid, p
574). The work of Sartre on intentionality (1970) and temporality (1960) is heavily influenced by
Husserl.
The important 1945 commentary by Merleau-Ponty mentioning Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness is clear: Human being should not be considered only as the result of external forces
that “shape him from the outside and make him one thing among many”, (1964a, p 71). The
existential view is one that “consists of recognizing an a-cosmic freedom… as he [human being] is
spirit and represents to himself the very causes which supposedly act upon him”, (p 72). A certain
tension exists. On the one hand, “man,” human being, “is part of the world; on the other, he is the
constituting consciousness of the world”, (Op cit). Equivalently, for Merleau-Ponty, the object is in
a “relationship of being” to the subject (Op cit). But this central focus is not to dismiss the rich
number of other themes, nor the central attention to meaning and interpretation of what appears to
consciousness. In these respects, Merleau-Ponty commented that “relativism … is an
anthropological fact,” (1964b, p 108) by which he seemed to have meant that whilst one deals with
human specifics then relativism ensues, because to stand outside of history is to claim an absolute
perspective and that is not acceptable (Ibid, p 109). Phenomenology of Perception has a thread
through it of the treatment of meaning: Because some meanings are ambiguous or manifold, and
these occupy the region of meaning, altogether meaning is an indeterminate region3 (1962, pp 6, 24,
54, 169). The relation to intersubjectivity is that bodily perspective is involved: “my body appears
to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task”, (Ibid, p 100). Other people
are an “inexhaustible ground”, (Ibid, p 361). Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty agreed that the
body expresses consciousness.
The point is that existentialism, according to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, deals with
meaningful concrete instances in a way that sends knowledge and theory back to lived experience
thus overcoming ‘dead reference,’ the practical and conceptual clichés that inhabit manners of
thinking, speaking and relating.
Hermeneutics as prior to cause and effect
5
This section considers some aspects of meaning and intersubjective understanding before providing
some answers in the following two sections.
The view of existential therapy in this paper is that it is primarily hermeneutic
phenomenological philosophy in application to the practice, research and supervision of therapy.
All therapies are ‘equal’ when understood as being hermeneutic in inevitably occupying a stance
towards psychological and intersubjective life. Possibly there are as many styles of practice as there
are therapists and it would be pointless to try and create uniformity amongst a school of therapists
as long as some minimum standards of deportment were attained. But it is noted that where
existential therapy differs from other approaches is that it is mindful of the difference between
conditions for understanding - and theories of cause and effect (“formulation” as it is sometimes
called). This difference does not always appear in non-existential approaches, which only focus on
confused ideas about cause and effect. Before considering the question concerning cause and effect
that is preferred in this essay, two points are selected as being important.
(a) Existential therapy is primarily phenomenological philosophy applied to psychotherapy,
psychology and the human sciences in the manner of sceptical criticism - especially of the natural
scientific, quantitative stances. This is not to say that as qualitative psychological research can pass
without critical comment.
(b) There is the historical importance of Kant’s a priori style of argument as a backdrop within this
approach to the philosophy of psychotherapy4 (Gardner, 1999). The style and content of work by
Edelson, Popper, Grunbaum and Erwin does not help establish rules for distinguishing accuracy of
understanding from its lack. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre occupy a place of opposition to Kant, yet the
influence of Kant’s demand to focus on the possible and thinkable, prior to the empirical and actual,
is clear. The main thrust of philosophy after Kant is to work out how concepts are effective or not,
and to understand how humans understand, from the safety of the philosophers’ armchair.
Philosophy is not the ultimate test of ideas against psychosocial reality. That is the job of empirical
research. So in the philosophy of psychotherapy, logical coherence becomes a discussion of
emotional and relational coherence and the consequences of the practice of ideas.
A pertinent philosophical question is ‘how would we know whether a therapeutic concept
worked or not?’ The answer provided here is that a concept would have to be related to the aims
and nature of therapy and details would have to be specified. The question of how we would know
whether a therapy concept worked or failed can also be asked in the context of how any
understanding is shared with clients. A pertinent question is then ‘how would we know whether
therapy understood its clients or not?’ (A question asked from the comfort of the armchair of
thought, rather than in the heat of the moment when therapists and clients can be confused and
caught up in something they do not fully understand, emotionally nor relationally). The answer this
6
paper provides is to claim that the key point is to have a theory of how the perspectives of clients
and therapists co-relate, in the same relationship and conversation, according to the same topic they
discuss. Without such a theory, then the centrality of dialogue and the face-to-face encounter will
be misrepresented. Such a perspective would be related to clients in a way that can create an
adequate understanding of meaning in the therapy situation. In order to appraise if existential
therapy, or indeed any kind of transcendental philosophical approach to therapy, is sufficient or not,
it would have to consider the conditions of possibility of therapy concepts as they lie between
therapists and clients. This is with respect to understanding other persons, and so making tangible
the nature of the influence of the past, the nature of emotional contact between the parties involved,
the way in which the relationship is understood from a position which is neither wholly the clients’
nor the therapists’ instantaneous sense of the interaction as it unfolds. The topics under
consideration usually focus on the generalised sense of other persons that clients have,
‘transference,’ an affective state or manner of relating, interpreting or thinking, which can be
interpreted from the presence of clients.
In the above, the role of hermeneutics appears: There is a whole; however difficult it is to
state what is included in it. Therapists mark out a part of the whole as important, in order to identify
something as crucial in terms of commenting on the problem as clients see it (as indeed clients mark
out a part of the whole as problematic). For this paper, hermeneutics and intentionality go hand in
hand. There is a hermeneutic manifold of perspectives that can be taken towards any psychological
event. One way of stating this is to say that there are intersubjective conscious senses of any
cultural object: what this means is that there are many publicly-accessible conscious understandings
of any experience. Another way of stating the same is to write that all meaning exists within the
possibility of understanding not only one’s own but also others’ understandings on the same object.
These statements are perfectly in-line with intentionality in that there is a shared pool of the
lifeworld, of cultural life, that shows how two or more persons can share the same perspective as
one another5.
To take points (a) and (b) above, about the influence of Kant in existential phenomenology a
little further, the area of agreement for Husserl and Heidegger is the relation between concepts and
everyday experience. For Husserl after 1931, description is referred to as a “new naïveté, that of
simple descriptive act analysis”, (Cairns, 1976, p 27), which implies an unclear hermeneutic
position. For Heidegger, philosophy returns to the everyday as “the point of departure for the
ontological problematic”, (1996, p 397). Heidegger’s hermeneutic position is in part a novel version
of Dilthey and within the German tradition of hermeneutics.
Yet let us not lose sight of the work of helping clients. In answer to the question, ‘what
should psychotherapy concepts do to aid practice?’ One response is that they should enable
7
therapists to meet clients and understand them. If concepts made a relational, affective or other
distance, whereby clients could not get help or therapists came to mis-understand, then a helpful
encounter may not be achieved. (There might even be a purposeful role of intellectualising
therapeutic work in order to keep the feelings of clients from ‘contaminating therapists,’ but that
possibility must be dealt with elsewhere). In order to make this section more explicit, something
needs to be said of the type of activities that occur in any therapy. Minimally but not exclusively,
the following mutual tasks are meant:
• Understanding the problems of clients in new contexts, where what seems nonsensical or
unrelated to them, is made clear by the affective and relational perspective of therapy, its
psychological-hermeneutic stance. At heart, therapy is making sense of past occurrences, fearful
anticipations, and problematic sensitivities in the present (etcetera).
• Making links between events, thoughts and feelings in a way that has not occurred for clients but
is apparent from the perspective of therapists. Interpreting in the psychodynamic sense occurs and
is part of everyday cause and effect interpretation. Such thinking is suggesting possible ‘causes’
concerning influential or motivating factors for feeling and action. “It would seem not unreasonable
- not qualitatively different from the ways in which we come to conclusions in ordinary living - for
the therapist to point out to her patient the verbal and non-verbal behaviour that leads her to
think…” that such and such is the case (Lomas, 1987, p 33).
• Helping clients not miss their own strengths and reducing hurtful self-criticism. Helping clients to
undo reifications of their self-image and their generalised senses of other people. Perhaps through
appreciating their own strengths rather than fixating on themselves as weak, under attack,
unlovable, bad or useless.
• Entering into non-dogmatic dialogue and analysing emotional and relational situations with
clients, including the immediate therapeutic one, with a view to enabling them to make better
decisions and promote their quality of life.
Given that existential therapy is both hermeneutic and intentional, what does this mean?
If the differences between and within the therapies are differences of hermeneutic stance,
then all employ some means of interpreting the intentionality of clients and self. At large, the
importance of hermeneutics has generally been over-looked. One way of stating hermeneutics as a
core concern is to understand it as the means of contextualising psychological problems and their
treatment. For instance, one interpretation might be that they are only a reaction to current stimuli
because of pairing between stimulus and response. A second, that they are due to the accrual of the
influence of the past, where past attachment difficulties, trauma and defensive choices and
positions, have created specific lines of development. A third interpretation might be that
8
psychological problems are due to the accrued effects of stress on the brain and the physiology of
an individual. A fourth might account for physical predisposition that through a first occurrence, is
maintained by a variety of communications, implied requests and functions. All such stances begin
with interpreting concepts out of everyday and therapeutic experience - and there is the relation
between the part and the whole? But how, to what, why and when do concepts refer to
psychological experience as a whole?
Practice follows theory, in that the understanding of the problem orients therapists and
clients in some way. The first question that follows on is ‘how does psychological life make sense
to anybody?’ Because a hermeneutic stance is prior to ideas of cause and effect, the two should not
be confused and hypothesising about cause and effect needs to be investigated. One piece of
received wisdom is that if it is possible to know how a problem started, it will show how it
originally solved or avoided a problematic consequence. A second piece of received wisdom is that
if it is possible to know how a problem is maintained, it will show how to curtail the problem. But
is it at all possible to judge developmental lines in a person’s lifespan? Or to judge between
resultant states as opposed to traits of the ego or personality? What are the most fundamental points
that need to be taken into account when understanding psychological understanding?
The opening pages of Being and Nothingness provide an answer that is fundamentally
hermeneutic. Sartre wrote of the interrelation between consciousness, the body and the cultural
object, “abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in
an isolated state. The concrete by contrast is a totality which can exist by itself alone”, (1958, p 3, a
reading of Husserl, 1982, §15). What he posited is the following: Psychological qualities, relations,
affect, intentions are all abstractions and do not exist apart from the bodies of self, others and
community. Such qualities and relationships are interpretations and abstract nouns that indicate the
inter-relationship between living persons in relationship. Consciousness is interpreted as intentional
in meeting others in the lifeworld of everyday culture and society. Emotion, relating, thinking and
complex co-occurrences concern different types of mental processes or syntheses and none of them
are “concrete” in the phenomenological sense. For existential phenomenology, the manifold of
meanings of cultural objects, as cognised beings, are interpreted as the result of mental processes. If
these cognitive-affective processes are not accounted for, this makes human being insufficiently
understood. The point is that this is a self-reflexive stance and that a wholism is required to
understand intentionality and the implication of intentionality between people.
Accordingly, intentionality is a fundamental understanding and concepts about it are
required to point to its nature and importance. Due to Brentano’s influence on Freud and Husserl,
there is the commonality that they use versions of the concept of intentionality. This is because
Brentano lectured to both whilst they were students at the University of Vienna. Intentionality is held
9
to be a good interpretative form because it includes multiple types of intentional relation to an object.
The reason for this is that one has first-hand experience of one’s own consciousness and it is then
acceptable to assume that others persons are conscious too. Without intentionality, object-senses are
considered but there is no account of how people can have several types of intentional relation to the
same referent. Thus, existentialism is opposed to forms of interpretation that deny the existence or
usefulness of intentionality in explaining the sharable psychological life. Freud and Husserl shared
intentionality as a base concept and so do the population at large who understand it in a less precise
way. It is easy to discuss with clients how persons distract themselves, how a topic appears in their
thoughts, or show how a person is frightened that something will happen, or how a person is fixated
on the past. All such manners of communication concern intentionality and not Being alone. Freud,
Husserl and the everyday employ interpretation in the general sense. When we are with others, we
infer that their speech, behaviour and emotions are in some way ‘caused’ by their consciousness. Such
interpretation indicates the being of consciousness. One’s own consciousness never fully appears to
self. The consciousness of others never appears apart from its mediated occurrence in the living bodies
of others. Consciousness and its intentionality concern the number of ways human beings can plan,
remember, wish, play, love and hate… It is argued that this ‘meta-representational’ picture of the
intentionality of consciousness has advantages over other types of theorising in that it distinguishes
between the manifold senses and their referent. (More will be made of this distinction below where
meta-representation is more fully explained). Therefore, existential therapy is a legacy of taking
consciousness seriously and being able to create a theoretical discourse about how people are aware
of meaning and relate to the same meaningful objects in different ways6.
But many therapies that follow the natural attitude confuse cause and effect with
meaningfulness. It is only in the existential and hermeneutic traditions that hermeneutics is given
priority over cause and effect. Natural ideas of cause construe an effect as it being impossible for a
specific human condition to be otherwise than it is, because of its specific cause. The existential
view of ‘cause’ is the assertion that meaning is not at all caused in the way that matter is caused to
behave. When meanings occur they are influenced between people, they are encouraged or chosen,
they are associations and remembrances, there is the influence of the past and other forms.
An allied question with respect to meaning can now be stated. ‘What is the scope of
therapy?’ The answer given here is according to the actuality that there are intentional ‘causes’ and
‘effects’. The psychological form of ‘cause’ is not the type of cause that operates within natural
being, that an outcome cannot be otherwise. But rather that there is an influence or motivation
between experiences and among people. Three kinds of cause can be identified after Kern (1986)
and his distinctions are necessary to take account of the complex interrelation of these causes in
specific instances:
10
1 Socially mediated motivations from contact with others, may become engrained, habituated and
be understood by self, as parts of self that cannot change. They include the on-going presence of the
social past. Socially mediated motivations are those of folk psychology, the ordinary understanding
of emotional and relational life, understood in the context of the conditions of possibility of history,
society and culture.
2 Personal choice, free will and personal preference exist in connection with habituated constraint
in the individual (cf Sartre). Personal choice can be understood in the context of the conditions of
possibility of personal conscience, social context and the effects of psychological trauma on the
individual.
3 Cause in the material sense is due to physical inheritance and predisposition. Material cause (or
“heritability”) in human beings is understood in the context of the conditions of possibility shown
by the psychobiology that indicates mental and physical freedom and constraint.
These three types of cause co-occur and it is difficult to identify the precise influence of
each in any client or their problems and answers to them. Any actual psychological influence is also
an ethical question as to the value and extent that change might bring.
There could be further debate into the nature of philosophy and psychotherapy. For these are
regions are far from having any consensus on how to proceed. There are a large number of writers
who have contributed to the field of existential psychotherapy and it is true that many writers have
not yet been mentioned with respect to those who have followed on since Sartre first published
Being and Nothingness. Something does need to be said of the relation between these writers in
order to make clear the stance of existential therapy to itself7.
Talking and action as parts of the whole of psychological meaningfulness
This section discusses the scope of what existential thought can consider concerning speech and
action.
Like the non-existential stances (of schools or individuals), the existential writers are those
who comment on parts of everyday living, the whole of the ordinary psychological life of any
human being. In everyday life, talking and action are moments of a whole as are all the specific
parts of the whole, such as thinking, feeling, relating, planning, remembering so on and so forth.
Talking and action are moments of the whole in therapy also. Despite whether change does or does
not take place, emotion is linked to thought and action, bodily sensation is linked to imagination
and memory to habit and to relating… The point is that the full range of existential writers
comment on parts of the whole with respect to the talking and action therapies, as representative of
the whole of psychotherapy. Practically speaking, talking therapy (psychodynamic, person-centred,
11
interpersonal therapy, etc) is a part of the whole that focuses on the therapeutic relationship and
meaningfulness. It seems to me that talking therapy is easiest for the largest part of the population
to enter. Whereas action therapies (those demanding that clients occupy a specific hermeneutic
stance and carry out specific instructions and actions) are more superficial because they are not as
accessible in the way that talking is. The point I wish to make here is not to mistake the part for the
whole. Talking and relating are parts of the whole, as is taking action. But because of the ease of
talking and relating, with respect to taking action, it seems to me that talking and relating come
before ‘interventionism’ (cognitive behavioural therapy or any specific request to ask clients to do
something in order for them to help themselves). Therefore, any choice of how to provide therapy
needs to appraise non-specific talking and relating to clients - as one approach to meaning - or to
consider that there might be a specific way of directly changing the meaning and experience of
some situation through clients taking action. Because existential therapy is a philosophically
informed set of approaches, perhaps it can find some answers to the further questions that arise. In a
different terminology, I am claiming that the distinction between being and doing is a false one.
This is shown by there being no guarantee that an intervention (which might only be verbal) will
have any specific consequence. An intervention in relating may or may not produce any change.
Alternatively, it might produce a number of changes to parts of the whole for clients. For instance, a
verbal-cognitive intervention might promote change in re-evaluating self-worth, and promote
changes in becoming more assertive and leaving behind past influence and so tend to make clients
anticipate a brighter future and be able to empathise others more accurately - or it may not.
What is being argued for is a future task of accounting for the talking therapies that treat the
person; and the action therapies that treat the problem (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy and
other specifically interventionist approaches8). On the one hand, the talking therapies are flexible
and enable clients to take part in something towards understanding and helping themselves.
(Perhaps the skills required for talking and relating cannot be wholly taught. In my experience of
teaching post-graduate students, perhaps some trainees cannot be taught how to understand
themselves in relation to others because their personality is disposed in another way). On the other
hand, the action therapies are more specifically focused on teachable skills and require a specific
focus for clients to take part in them. It seems that something of this dichotomy is also present in
the broad grouping called existential therapy. The point is that if talking is more fundamental than
action, in that all clients and therapists have to communicate in order to understand and negotiate
help; then the action therapies go a stage further, and are encouraging a second, less fundamental
stage of actions and analyses built on the necessity of there having been prior talking and relating.
If this is agreed, then the less fundamental interventionist approaches need an account of talking
and relating that is sufficient to engage clients in their therapeutic processes.
12
What has been stated so far are some exploratory steps in a philosophical approach to
working out how concepts fit together or not. This is not identical with experimental methods in
psychology. The next section furthers an exploration of psychological reality that connects with
hermeneutics, intentionality and intersubjectivity.
Meta-representation as a fundamental concept
So, taking a step closer to practice, there arises the centrality of hermeneutics within the context of
philosophical reflection on there being multiple, intersubjectively accessible stances, as these can
be applied to the actual work of meeting with clients. For understanding hermeneutics, for instance,
there is the work of Rickman (1997, 1999) who bases his approach on Dilthey. Going further
towards understanding the specifics of intersubjectivity, there is the experimental work of Perner
and colleagues who have investigated the phenomena of shared meaning and the developmental
changes that occur in children as they come to understand others and, for instance, the specific case
that others can have false beliefs and what this means (1991). The advantage of an intentional or
meta-representational understanding of consciousness and intersubjectivity is that there are marked
differences between:
• Perception or primary representation in the five senses of what is current - and - presentiation, or
secondary representation, that occurs in empathy, recollection, anticipation, depiction or
imagination, for instance.
• Mis-representation of differences, accuracy and inaccuracy, true or false, occur with respect to
what is held to be the case - as opposed to what self or others might believe to be the case.
• Meta-representation is the “ability to represent the representational relation itself,” to represent
representations, and specifically, to represent how others are representing a cultural object
(Pylyshyn, 1978, p 593). This was explicit in Husserl’s theorising about intentionality: For instance,
picturing presentiation involved in visual works of art occurs through a “difference between
“picture” and “depictured””, (Husserl, 1982, §99, p 245): Meaning that in the case of visual art, the
canvass is perceived; whereas the scene that the painting is about is presentiated, depicted in the
canvass. To be able to make such distinctions as these require an understanding of intentionality
and Perner and colleagues have shown that major changes take place in children’s understanding of
themselves and the social world around three to four years of age. This understanding is related to a
move from understanding specific situations, to an entry into an empathic and intersubjective
understanding of the world and all forms of meaning in it, as publicly accessible and reliant on the
perspective taken towards them.
13
In the case of therapy, meta-representation means to represent that another person is
representing their perspective on an object in some specific way. Husserl, Gurwitsch and Merleau-
Ponty agreed that intentionality involves such a meta-representative perspective of empathising
another human being as having a specific profile of an object, through some intentional relationship
to it, which is different to our own profile on it. It is argued that this specific point is a minimally
accurate understanding of humanity. Perner has established an experimental position with respect to
the referents of different types of mental process and the cognition of reality. The work of Perner
and colleagues is a genuine example of intentionality in developmental psychology. Perner
concludes that “metarepresentation is in fact indispensable for modelling the information-gathering
process and thereby understanding how it works and how one can improve it so that the model of
reality reflects as accurately as possible”, (1991, p 40). Meta-representation is: “Explicit
understanding … that one and the same representation can have different interpretations,” (Ibid, p
102) or perspectives, and this is compatible with hermeneutics. The empirical finding is that three
year old children generally “cannot answer explicit questions about why a person knows or doesn’t
know something”, (Ibid, p 151). Perner and colleagues also show that the adult experimenters’
requirement for a verbal response from a four year old can inhibit the ability of children to
communicate their understanding. When three year olds are permitted to point, or can answer by
merely looking in the right direction, or are permitted to respond with physical activity, they point
at the right answer in meta-representational experiments when they are three. The main finding was
that children greater than three years old were able to make “a distinction between representing a
fact and making a judgment about a fact”, (Clements & Perner, 1994, p 377).
Wimmer and Perner (1983, p 103) noted that five to six year olds could tell the difference
between a lie and a mistaken assumption 94% of the time as opposed to 28% of the time for four to
five year old children. Peskin (1992, p 84) concluded that the “success of the older children in
concealing information indicated their new representational understanding that to influence
another’s behavior, one must influence that person’s mental state”. Botterill and Carruthers
conclude on behalf of Perner that the “theory of mind development cannot be explained in terms of
quasi-scientific theorising, because scientific theorising would be entirely impossible without mind-
reading ability”, (1999, p 94). Meta-representation is a development of Brentano’s intentionality
and a genuinely useful development of it in a way that surpasses Heidegger’s to turn to philosophy
and being, because it accounts for the interrelation of perspectives of self and other.
‘Mind reading,’ in an approximate sense, or better, empathy in the existential sense, is
empathising within the intersubjective world about common referents and different perspectives on
them. It is a condition for rationality and experimentation. For instance, it has been shown
empirically that children who have more siblings are likely to understand when others have false
14
beliefs earlier than those who have fewer siblings. One interpretation of this finding is to conclude
that empathic ability, that employs imaginative transposal in to the place of other persons, is further
developed through early socialisation (Perner, Ruffman & Leekam, 1994). The point for therapy is
that traumatic memories and associations are ‘causative’ of the current state of clients in terms of
how they relate with others and how they live their lives according to the cognitive and affective
senses that they find around themselves. In childhood, or for adults who suffer trauma at an earlier
time, there have been harmful experiences and forms of communication that have produced
insecure attachment styles. Verbal and physical violence, and neglect of the needs and rights of
children, contribute to a tendency to be unable to re-attach securely to their carers, even in those
cases where it is not the carers who have been the perpetrators of the abuse. Generally, the previous
violations have the continuing effect that the adult becomes unable to soothe them and connect with
other persons (there are a number of permutations on this theme). This factor often leads the
traumatised adult to therapy in the first place, as they are unable to help themselves. Their ego-
constancy, senses of others and ability to attach are damaged. They appear as strongly influenced
by the past and have inaccurate understandings of themselves, others and the world in that they treat
the current situation according to the old one and expect that the future will be as harsh as their
childhood.
Close
What the paper has argued for is the view that existential analysis or psychotherapy is at least a
wide church and sceptical of psychology as science. It is a critical space and the application of
hermeneutic phenomenological philosophy to any form of psychotherapy. The task of therapy’s
self-understanding is to account for permissable theoretical contributions and state what types are
insufficient, in which ways. How do the interpretative stances work or not? How might some be
more adequate than others? Why might one prefer concept A to concept B? Such are the type of
questions that are at the heart of this tradition of philosophical thinking.
In a nutshell, it would be possible to show there are problems with both Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s approaches to phenomenology. Husserl sidestepped hermeneutics in order to ascertain
the a priori conditions of possibility for consciousness to constitute meaning with other
consciousness. In so doing, he claimed it is possible to be absolute with respect to intersubjectivity
in the sense that he could account for the infinite manifold of perspectives on the same cultural
object because of the fundamental work of empathy, a mental process that quasi-gives the
perspectives of other persons ‘when we understand what they feel and experience’. This is an
absolute perspective because it relates the founding whole of intersubjectivity to specific
15
perspectives of self and other on the same object, and so accounts for different perspectives on it,
and the simultaneously different appearance of it, for more than one person. Heidegger sidestepped
consciousness and intentionality (mental process) in order to ascertain the a priori conditions of the
possibility for Da-sein to manifest the meaning of Being with other Da-sein in history. In so doing,
he claimed it is possible to refine hermeneutically one’s approach with respect to meaning, in the
sense that he achieved an absolute perspective on the primacy of Being. His perspective related the
transcendence of Da-sein’s Being in its everyday world, to historically accruing senses of the
meaning of Being. Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty agreed that a philosophically-informed
psychology must attend to everyday conscious experience.
When viewing the field of the therapies, there is no consensus and therapy does not have a
coherent theoretical account of the manifold of ideas and practices that comprises it. How can we
account for the lack of consensus? Maybe there is no formulaic correspondence between concepts
and experience because there is the possibility of hermeneutic differences and influences of
interpretation at every stage of reckoning. But because of the lack of consensus, even in the field of
philosophically self-reflexive approaches like existential therapy, there is a need to justify one’s
interpretations and actions. The first stage in doing this is to account for oneself and the approaches
of others in some ubiquitous way, in addition to the help provided through personal reflection and
supervision.
In summing up, there is a long and fruitful history of competing readings of Husserl and
Heidegger, some of which are more accurate than others. The paper has argued that a development
of intentionality, that a meta-representational theory of mind is acceptable to existential
phenomenology because it can support hermeneutic understanding of therapy and differing
perspectives. If the task of therapy is in part a pragmatic one, and if clients are able to use what it
offers, then one aim is to help them flexibly in numerous ways. A further question is ‘what ways are
suitable, in what conditions?’ On the one hand, dogmatism serves to reify and universalise ideas
way outside of their context of applicability: for dogma there is only one acceptable theoretical-
hermeneutic stance. On the other hand, the ability to account for the perspectives of others is a
major topic for therapy and ordinary life. It is argued that there should be no slavish adherence to
theory. If existential therapy is to follow its ability to be a critical philosophical approach, in
scrutinising its own and other approaches, then it will have to account for the divide between
talking therapy and working with the therapeutic relationship; and the more interventionist styles of
working. The refusal of consciousness and intentionality smacks of radical behaviourism that
refused to account for consciousness because it lies outside of that which can be measured and
modelled by natural science.
16
Notes 1 It can be argued that Heidegger did not treat intentionality as intentionality but obscured Husserl’s
comments in Ideas I on intentional implication and modification and turned away from the
phenomena to Greek philosophy. Specifically, he turned away from the phenomena of the different
types of givenness and abandoned a possible critique and development of the investigation of
noesis-noema correlates. In Heidegger’s writing, Husserl’s phenomenology is defined without
mentioning the major focus on the intentional analysis of noeses and what that means in terms of
stating how mental processes work (for instance Husserl, 1982, §99, §111). It is not clear whether
this was a purposeful mis-representation of Husserl’s case or not. However, Heidegger’s critique of
Husserl made Heidegger’s phenomenology into an object-related study in the context of ancient
Greek philosophy rather than the relation of the being of Da-sein to the being of what exists and
how it exists for Da-sein.
2 The first and most explicit reduction is a philosophical and historical one, the same as defined by
Husserl in 1913 (1982, §18, p 34, cf Heidegger, 1996, §6, p 22). Heidegger’s comments on the
stripping away of the usual meaning and assumptions that occur when tools go missing is a
reduction through the interruption of everyday unthematized experience. This ‘mistake reduction’
(Ibid, §16, p 68-69) is a reduction by the accidental disclosure of an assumption. Reduction also
happens through the experience of Angst in which the assumptions of having a home in a safe and
well-known world are temporarily eradicated (Ibid, §40, p 174-8). Fourth, there is the reduction to
temporality and what that reveals as the ultimate horizon or ground of the Being of Da-sein and for
Da-sein’s understanding of Being: “existential-temporal analysis of Da-sein requires in its turn a
new retrieve in the context of a fundamental discussion of the concept of being”, (Ibid, §66, p 306
and §79, p 276-7). Fifth, through semantic ‘archaeology’ it is possible to reactivate or make a
reprise (Wiederholung), a rediscovery of original meaning (Kocklemans, 1977). Heidegger wanted
ontology to begin a de-constructive comparison, where contemporary ties of meanings are held in
abeyance and checked with respect to the original meanings, practices and the worldviews of the
ancients. It is not clear what makes ancient understanding better than contemporary understanding
and why that is always preferable.
3 Merleau-Ponty, particularly in Phenomenology of perception, often expressed Husserl’s stance in
a more accessible way than Husserl did. This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty agreed with
everything that Husserl wrote.
17
4 Gardner’s portrayal of Critique of Pure Reason states a focus on finding the limits of rational
thought - as opposed to how thought can be over-ambitious. Page after page concerns a focus on the
competence of what reason can comprehend in relation to conscious experience. Since Kant,
philosophy has the job of deciding on the proper extent of thought before taking action.
5 This is in answer to Kant’s request to explore the “a priori conditions of possible experience in
general are at the same time conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience”, (1993, p
128/A110). This means that the conditions of experience dictate the nature of the objects of
experience and lead to the connection with intentionality, intersubjectivity and hermeneutics in
relation to the manifold of possible meanings of one object, process or event.
6 The treatment of consciousness by natural psychological science falls roughly into two camps.
Either consciousness is no special challenge to its methods and stance and its difficulties fall within
its dominion. Or consciousness is not an object capable of scientific scrutiny and it falls outside of
its limits. Both of these positions are current in psychology and cognitive science and have also
existed in therapy. Cognitive behaviour therapy does not distinguish between the differing types of
intentionality nor does it account for the intentional pairings of sense. For instance, the basic
manoeuvre in behaviour therapy is to reduce avoidance and increase exposure to a feared object.
What this often entails is breaking the composite meaning of a bodily reaction (eg Panic) that is in a
paired association with anticipatory fear (say dying). What behaviour therapy does is to help clients
be able to experience a panic episode without the conditioned fear. This reduces the occurrence and
alters the meaning of panic. Furthermore, reframing is a hermeneutic procedure and stoicism is
involved in asking people to overcome their fear of fear that has become habituated and
generalised. Still the work of Fonagy (2003), Wells (1997) and Tarrier, Wells and Haddock (1998)
warrants study.
7 There are five ‘axes’ that can be related to the centrality of Husserl and Heidegger. The first axis
is to understand the relation of Husserl to his phenomenological philosophy peers of Scheler, the
early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This axis comprises the core phenomenological writers and
this group would also include Sartre but to a lesser extent. Overall, Sartre had a broader focus and
belongs continental philosophy. A second axis would compare Freud to the phenomenological
influence on therapy of the sort initiated either by Boss, Ricoeur (1970) or Atwood and Stolorow.
And there is the matter of how to read Freud (Lohser & Newton, 1996). Lacan could be placed in
this grouping because he was influenced by Merleau-Ponty on the importance of language but he
did not follow phenomenology despite having been influenced by Heidegger (Roudinesco, 1990, p
299). A third axis moves from Husserl’s influence to how it has been taken up by American
phenomenological psychology, that is argued to be a rush headlong into non-a-priori
experimentalism entirely against the instructions of the phenomenological philosophers who require
18
self-reflexivity and analysis of justifications. A fourth axis lies in the direction towards
hermeneutics. This path takes into account the specific contributions of Dilthey, Mannheim,
Parsons, Ricoeur, Derrida and Gadamer, for instance. It is important, as it is a commonality within
existentialism. There is a fifth axis toward the work of Levinas and ethics. There could be a more
philosophical approach that would follow the trends from the Ancients, through Descartes to Kant
and appraise Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaarde, Sartre, Foucault and others.
8 Wilson (1996) is a representative of a movement towards the use of empirically-validated
manualised treatments. What this means is that therapy should be practised in a universalised
manner for all persons who have a specific disorder. For him, there is no need to attend to the
unique details of someone’s life because such material is not capable of validation in tests of inter-
rater reliability. The upshot is that therapy should be practised according to manuals that dictate the
results of treatments that have been experimentally proven to work.
Ian Owen, UKCP Reg, is an adult psychotherapist with Leeds Mental Health Trust. He completed
an MA in counselling and psychotherapy at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent’s
College, London, in 1991and first became registered as a psychotherapist in 1995.
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